Baseball, my comfort watch

I’ve been seeing some folks post about their comfort watches or reads and it’s had me thinking the past week about baseball. It’s my comfort watch. This year especially I think I’ve watched a lot of baseball, but we’ll see what MLB says when they send the end of year stats.

I’m not a lifelong baseball fan, in fact I think I’m a rather new baseball fan. It started in 2020 for me. In 2019 G bought a streaming package to watch his childhood hometown team, the Brewers. I didn’t really watch much that year at all. It all changed in 2020, when the baseball season was suspended during spring training, MLB opened up the archives to anyone with an account for free and we started watching 2019 games on the same day and month they were played they year earlier. It was a window into a sense of normalcy, seeing the crowds together in stadiums. It didn’t matter that the games were already played because we didn’t remember the details from a game a year earlier and that’s all it took, I was hooked. We’ve traveled to games at all the major teams on the west coast and this year we went to spring training as well.

Fast forward to this year when the world is again in complete turmoil of a different kind and I needed to get away from it, baseball was my refuge. We now pay to be able to stream any game in the MLB (except where we’re blacked out, don’t get me going on that). Usually while watching I knit, it’s the perfect thing to keep my hands busy and away from my phone.

In the last few seasons we’ve also started listening to radio broadcasts if there is a game on and we have decent service while on road trips. I’ve discovered some absolutely amazing broadcasters, including Tom Hamilton who calls the Guardians games and Howie Rose who broadcasts Mets games. Just a few weeks ago I listened to the Guardians play off series with the Tigers on the radio because the radio broadcasters follow their teams and cover them all the way through the playoffs, unlike TV where the playoff games are nationally broadcast and the announcers aren’t nearly as familiar with the teams, a weakness in the system I think.

Now that baseball season is winding down, the playoffs are down to the final four teams (GO BREWERS!), I’m thinking about what I’m going to do to replace it and what my comfort watch will be this winter. But I also know when the World Series ends, no matter who’s in it or who wins I’ll be watching, I’ll be counting down the days to when pitchers and catchers report in February.